Quick blogging update for October 2018

One of my personal goals for the year has been to write more, and
this is the sixty-fifth post of the year.
At the end of January I wrote up some notes on my blogging,
and nine months later I wanted to take a step back to jot down some
thoughts on my approach and what I've learned along the way.

Since I've started writing, traffic has been more-or-less consistently going
up each month, which is quite exciting. A year ago, most months generated about
ten thousand pageviews, and the last three months average closer to thirty thousand
or so.

What those monthly numbers don't do a great job of showing is just how hits-based
things are, with the "good" months being driven by just one or two top articles.

Months without a strong performing piece are doing fourteen to sixteen
thousand pageviews. That's decently good year-over-year growth, but feels
low given I wrote nine posts in August, 2018 to reach sixteen thousand pageviews, and wrote
zero in August, 2017 (actually, nothing between May 20th and November 18th in 2017)
to drive a bit over eight thousand pageviews.

Looking over the top twenty articles over the past twelve months,
what stands out to me are (1) the top two articles over the past year were written
in 2011 and 2009, (2) the "hit" articles are those that apply to a broader audiences
of software engineers, and (3) that articles about engineering management simply
don't drive much traffic.

Equally interestingly and less obvious, is that while I experimented frequently with
distribution avenues (Twitter tweet storms, LinkedIn posts and articles, Medium, etc),
I stopped devoting much energy towards distribution three or four months ago.
Instead I've focused on writing more, and hopefully better, content, and I find
it fascinating that you can't tell from my traffic graphs when I switched approaches.

To the extent that you can see any difference, it's that traffic has gone up since
I've stopped pursuing distribution.

This isn't because distribution doesn't matter, I remain pretty confident that
distribution is more important than quality of content, but more that I think
if you write consistently and of reasonable quality, folks who are focused on
distribution will leverage your stuff towards their own goals, symbiotically
and organically collaborating with you, the content creator.
Said differently, distribution is still critical, but for most of us it's more
effective to piggyback on other folks' distribution channels by writing good
content that they want to share, then to develop our own.

The other primaary metric I started out focusing on was Twitter followers,
where I started the year at about 2,200 and am now up to 3,500 (including +150
over the past thirty days), which is about half way to my somewhat arbitrary
goal of 5,000 followers by the end of the year.

Somewhat interestingly, and strategically hidden by Twitter's analytics tooling by
only showing "new followers" for historical months, is that I was close to 3,500
followers three or four months earier, and lost about five hundred followers in
what I assume was a bot follower purge. If that purge hadn't happened, maybe I would
be in striking distance to hit the followers goal, but I'm pretty sure that
chasing that goal too directly isn't too valuable. Rather, I have some latent
hope that followers correlates to writing valuable writing, such that
subjugating the system to that goal wouldn't lead where I want to follow
(more intentionally controversial takes, etc).

Reflecting on all of this over the past few months, I've adjusted my writing goals a bit,
with a rough plan of focusing my writing on these areas for the rest of 2018
and likely through 2019 as well:

management - collecting my writing on engineering management,
particularly over the last sixx months, into a book of some sort.
This is somewhat likely to happen at this point, although like most things
I won't believe it until it's actually done. My systems approach to management
is far from novel, but I do think it's a toolkit that would be valuable for many
folks who aren't currently familiar with it, and hopefully collecting my writing
together towards this end might be useful for a few folks, which is about the best case
outcome I've ever expected to come from my writing.

More generally, most of my professional work is in engineering management,
which means most of the new things I learn on a daily basis are related to
engineering management, and I'll continue writing them up here, because I've
found that to be much more leveraged approach to sharing ideas than any other
I've found so far.

infrastructure - I've learned a lot about infrastructure engineering
over the last year, and haven't written much of it down yet. I think this is a topic that is
more widely interesting to engineers than most stuff I've written recently.
I think if I focus writing on this arena for the next 12-18 months, there could be an interesting
book somewhere from scavaging all that material together.
This is effectively nothing available to read about how to create, lead and nurture infrastructure
engineering organizations, so I think a good verison of this could be quite good,
as long as there was content to back it up.

systems - using the systems library I'm cobbling together
create examples of modeling interesting and important problems.
Many business decisions made today are based on buggy spreadsheet models,
and I think systems thinking can be a powerful tool towards better generalized decision making.
I don't think folks want to read any of this, but I do think it's important,
so hopefully it'll be possible to.

random stuff like book reviews and stories of my own experience.
I don't think folks really care at all about this stuff either (much like I don't expect
anyone to ever really read this post), but
I enjoy writing these because they are very different and less structured writing formats,
and it feels good to stretch my range a bit sometimes.
Sometimes, like the Digg v4 launch, the stories are somewhat relevant,
but generally they probably won't be.

Otherwise, I'm also hopeful I can get more opportunities to speak publicly, both
at conferences--which I've never actually done before, and would love to develop
experience doing--and on podcasts, which I started doing this year
and was able to do three so far.

Altogether, this has been a pretty productive year for me so far, and I hope to close it out well
and carry the momentum forward into next year, without getting too deeply specialized in a single
area of focus.

Hi folks. I'm Will, known as @lethain on Twitter.
I write about software and management topics,
and love email at lethain[at]gmail.
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